Kathy Kelly (born 1952)Viklund, Jan (December 10, 2011). "Birthday Greetings to a Three-Times Nobel Peace Prize Nominee" . GandhiToday.org. Retrieved 2012-12-20. is an American peace activist, pacifist and author, one of the founding members of Voices in the Wilderness, and, until the campaign closed in 2020, a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. As part of peace team work in several countries, she has traveled to Iraq twenty-six times, notably remaining in combat zones during the early days of both US–Iraq wars.
From 2009 to 2019, her activism and writing focused on Afghanistan, Yemen, and Gaza, along with domestic protests against US drone policy. She has been arrested more than sixty times at home and abroad, and written of her experiences among targets of US military bombardment and inmates of US prisons.
Biography Early life and education, 1953–1978 Kelly was born in 1952 in Chicago's Garfield Ridge neighborhood to parents Frank and Catherine Kelly. She attended St. Paul-Kennedy "shared-time" high school, which split her days between a Catholic institution where she was given the writings of Daniel Berrigan and Martin Luther King Jr. to read alongside biblical texts, and a desegregating public school where interracial violence was common. She obtained her BA from Loyola University Chicago working a succession of night jobs to help cover tuition, including a stint on a meat-packing factory line which inspired her to become a lifelong vegetarian. During these years she remembers being deeply moved by Alain Resnais' Holocaust documentary Night and Fog, by a lecture by Vietnam War activist Tom Cornell, and by the activist scripture writings of William Stringfellow.
Poverty and peace activist, 1978–1996 After college in 1978, and while working on her MA in Religious Education (at Chicago Theological Seminary,) Kelly began volunteer work in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood (where she still resides), working at a local soup kitchen with a circle of activists, including future SOAW founder Roy Bourgeois, centered around Chicago's Francis of Assisi House, a homeless shelter in the Catholic Worker tradition. In 1980 she began work as a teacher of religion at St. Ignatius College Preparatory School.
In 1982 she married fellow activist Karl Meyer and began a lifetime of "war tax resistance" (refusal to pay federal taxes on pacifist grounds), asking her employer to reduce her salary beneath the taxable income. A Jesuit professional development grant enabled her to travel to Nicaragua in 1985 and participate in a fast led by Foreign Minister Miguel D'Escoto against US-backed Contra activity. Returning to the US, she left St. Ignatius in 1986 in order to focus on activism including two years as a teacher in Uptown's Prologue High School serving marginalized low-income youth.
In August 1988, Kelly participated in the Missouri Peace Planting, trespassing at a nuclear missile silo near Kansas City, Missouri, to plant corn on it. For this action she served nine months in a Lexington, Kentucky, minimum security prison.
In 1990 she joined the Gulf Peace Team, a delegation assembled to protest the imminent Persian Gulf War and spent the first 14 days of the air war encamped on the Iraq-Saudi border before evacuationNewman, Lisa (February 2, 1991). "Peace Activists Evacuated from Camp in Iraq" . Chicago Tribune. to Baghdad and then Amman in Jordan where she helped coordinate relief work.
Kelly helped organize and participated in several nonviolent direct action teams in war zones outside Iraq: Bosnia in December 1992 and August 1993, and Haiti in the summer of 1994. She and Meyer divorced in 1994 although they have continued as friends.
Voices in the Wilderness, 1996–2003 In 1993, after her return from Bosnia, Kelly became a full-time caregiver to her father, assisted (until his death in 2000) by a network of former Iraq peace team members now living in and around her and her father's shared Uptown apartment. In late 1995 Kelly and several other of these activists resolved to form Voices in the Wilderness (VIW), a campaign to end the US/UN sanctions regime against Iraq. In a January 1996 letter, the activists wrote then US Attorney General Janet Reno a letter declaring an intention to travel to Iraq with food and medicine in violation of the sanctions. A return letter threatened the participants with separate 12-year prison sentences and fines of one million dollars each.
Between 1996 and 2003 Voices organized over seventy delegations to Iraq bringing food and medicine directly to Iraqi citizens in deliberate violation of both UN-imposed economic sanctions and US law. Participants refused to pay fines for these actions but instead solicited matching donations from supporters for supplies to distribute on repeat visits. Members sought to raise awareness at home with demonstrations, media appearances, and personal accounts of their delegation work. Kelly went on 26 of these delegations.
Voices work was chiefly focused on, but not exclusive to, Iraq: in April 2002 Kelly and her fellow activists, walking on foot and engaging in repeated negotiations with Israeli Defense Force officers, became the first internationals to visit the Jenin refugee camp after learning, while on peace team work in the West Bank, of the recent attack there and what she described as its heavy civilian toll after observing it first-hand during her time at West Bank.
In March 2003, Kelly returned to Baghdad shortly before the start of the Iraq War, witnessing the Shock and Awe bombardment, and remaining for two months. She narrated her experiences of bombardment for Westerners via antiwar and religious witness websites. When the air war gave way to a ground invasion, she and other activists were present to greet arriving US soldiers with dates and water.
In November of that same year Kelly joined 43 other activists crossing illegally into the Fort Benning US Army base as part of the annual School of the Americas Watch vigil, and incurred a three-month prison sentence which she carried out in Illinois' Pekin Prison in 2004, to which she was seen off by longtime friend Studs Terkel. Her experiences in prison resulted in many of the essays collected in her book Other Lands Have Dreams, published in 2005.
Voices in the Wilderness was fined $20,000 by the US Treasury in 2003, which it refused to pay; it was "charged with exporting unspecified goods or services, which a spokesman said was related to delivering medicines to Iraq several years ago.""US fines Playboy for Cuban tale" . BBC.co.uk. April 21, 2003. Retrieved 2012-12-20. A judge affirmed the fine in late 2004.McClory, Robert (November 18, 2005). "Voices in Wilderness disbands; new group formed" . National Catholic Reporter (via TheFreeLibrary.com). Retrieved 2012-12-20. In 2005, Kelly announced that Voices in the Wilderness disbanded, and the group Voices for Creative Nonviolence was formed to continue challenging US military and economic warfare against Iraq and other countries.
Voices for Creative Nonviolence, 2005–2020 With Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Kelly carried on extensive activism outside of Iraq, most recently focusing on solidarity work in Kabul alongside a community of Afghan peace activists, support for the protest movement against naval base construction on South Korea's Jeju Island, and multiple visits to Gaza, where Kelly waited out Israel's 2009 "Cast Lead" operation in a region of Gaza along its border with Egypt which was sustaining heavy bombardment. Among numerous fasts and peace walks, Kelly has joined protests at several domestic USAF drone bases, incurring a June 2014 arrest with charges threatening a six-month prison sentence.
Shortly after formation, VCNV began sending delegations, several involving Kelly, to interview Iraqi refugees in countries neighboring Iraq, especially Jordan. In the summer of 2006, Kelly and other Voices activists traveled to Lebanon during the 2006 Lebanon War between Israel and Hezbollah, reporting from the capital city of Beirut and then, once the cease-fire was declared, from damaged villages in the country's south.
In 2007 VCNV initiated the "Occupation Project", in which activists in 25 states occupied the offices of 39 Senators and congressional Representatives whom they regarded as insufficiently committed to defunding the Iraq war. In the campaign's first ten weeks participants incurred 320 arrests. In the 2008 presidential campaign season, a corresponding campaign targeted candidates' offices, and included "Witness Against War," a march from Chicago to the 2008 Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
In January 2009, Kelly had helped organize "Camp Hope: Countdown to Change," a 19-day winter vigil two blocks from the Chicago home of then-President-Elect Barack Obama, but she spent most of the length of the vigil in Egypt and in the Gaza Strip, witnessing Israel's 22-day Operation Cast Lead assault on the region, living with a Gazan family in a neighborhood skirting the area under heaviest bombardment.
In April 2009, working with the Nevada Desert Experience, Kelly and fourteen others (including Louie Vitale, Stephen Kelly, Eve Tetaz, and John Dear), entered Creech Air Force Base to distribute leaflets protesting drone attacks in Pakistan piloted remotely from the base. They were arrested and charged with criminal trespass,Leys, Jeff (April 10, 2009). "Resisting the Afghanistan-Pakistan War" . Voices for Creative Nonviolence."Ground the Drones" . Nevada Desert Experience. 2009. for which they were sentenced to "time served" in a January 2011 ruling. The judge in the case had taken a 4-month recess to consider their claim to have entered the base in order to prevent a crime.
In May and June 2009, Kelly traveled to Pakistan with a small VCNV delegation, including activist Gene Stoltzfus, that met with organizations and families in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Shah Mansour,Kelly, Kathy (June 11, 2009). "Down and Out in Shah Mansour" . Huffington Post. Tarbella,Shahzad, Syed Saleem (September 22, 2008). "The Gloves Are Off in Pakistan" . The Asia Times (at commondreams.org). and Lahore, reporting back with essays.
As documented in a 2012 Al Jazeera documentary,Alsayed, Khabir. (video). Asdekaa Al Arab documentary series, Al Jazeera network. YouTube. in January 2010 Kelly was arrested in the rotunda of the US Capitol buildingArents, Jerica (January 27, 2010). "Remembering 'Suicides' in the Rotunda" . Commondreams.org. while taking part in a mock funeral, organized by Witness Against Torture, remembering Mani al-Utaybi, Yasser al-Zahrani, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed, three men then recently alleged to have been tortured to death in the US Guantanamo Bay prison complex. All participants of the protest were acquitted in court the following June.Kelly, Kathy (June 22, 2010) "Witnessing Against Torture: Why We Must Act" . Huffington Post.
In May 2010 Kelly made another Pakistan trip alongside activists Simon Harak and Josh Brollier. They met with families in the Swat Valley, Peshawar and Shah Mansur, as well as spending time in Rawalpindi, Islamabad, and Lahore. As part of this trip Kelly and Brollier travelled in Afghanistan as guests of the EMERGENCY, visiting Panjshir and First Aid Posts on the outskirts of Panjshir, Kabul, and Bagram (site of the Bagram Air Force Base). The stated intention of the trip was "learning more about conditions faced by ordinary people in Afghanistan".
Kelly made two other visits to Afghanistan in 2010, working closely with Bamiyan province's Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. In October and November 2010 she visited the Afghan youths for one week in their home province before spending several weeks in Kabul, where she met with refugees from Helmand province and representatives of several NGOs, and wrote reports on her experience.